According to the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, the average cost of downtime is $9,000 per minute in the US.
Just let that sink in for a moment.
As an IT professional, it’s your job to make sure that your infrastructure remains functional and secure even under duress. That’s why enterprise IT teams invest so much money into backup services and disaster recovery solutions.
Having a backup of mission-critical data is an absolute must for any organization, but what about backing up your system configurations? If you’re a business that has just migrated from on-premise to cloud-based servers using Microsoft 365, you need a proper solution to ensure that your configurations are recoverable if something goes wrong.
After all, being unable to comply with data regulations and leaving vulnerabilities in your system can have serious repercussions for your business.
In this article, we cover everything you need to know about backing up your tenant configurations for fuss-free recovery with Office 365, InTune, and Azure AD.
What makes managing Microsoft 365 configurations such a challenge for enterprises?
Microsoft lets you set up and manage your Microsoft 365 configurations through a portal called Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Admin Center features hundreds upon hundreds of settings that enable you to configure Microsoft 365 just the way you want — from enabling security features such as multi-factor authentication and data loss prevention policies to ensuring compliance with data regulations like HIPAA and GDPR.
Configuring your Microsoft 365 environment is hard enough. There are hundreds of screens to navigate through and thousands of properties to customize. You need to make sure that all the best practices are being followed properly and that there are no gaps in the security infrastructure.
Then, you also have to ensure that any ongoing changes made to your configurations further down the road don’t diminish your security and compliance posture. Any deviations that cause your business to falter from security compliance standards may prove to be a very costly affair for your organization.
Let’s take a look at an example scenario to see why backing up your Microsoft 365 configurations is so vital to the security of your business:
You’re an enterprise IT professional tasked with upgrading your Microsoft 365 environment to Windows 11. As part of the upgrade process, you add some conditional access policies only to later realize that things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. In the absence of a backup and restore solution for your Microsoft 365 business environment, your only choice is to try and roll back the changes you made based on random guesswork. If it works, great! But what if it doesn’t?
With a backup and restore solution for your Microsoft 365 configurations, you’re able to not only roll back your entire production environment to a known good state, but you’re also able to see a detailed report of the exact changes you made during your upgrade process and undo those changes one at a time.
This gives you an entirely new level of control over your Microsoft 365 configurations — knowing that if someone in your organization makes an undesired change, you’ll always be able to roll back to a previous version or even undo specific changes that are causing issues in your production environment.
Of course, that’s not all. Keeping proper documentation of your Microsoft 365 production environment can also be vital to your auditing process, especially when trying to establish proper compliance with existing data regulations like HIPAA and GDPR.
Large organizations can easily have over 100,000 unique configurations in their Microsoft 365 tenants. When disaster strikes, having your data backed up is important. But, without the ability to restore your configurations, you are left with weeks of reconfiguration just to get the basics working again.
With CoreView, you can back up your M365 configurations so you can become operational again if your tenant goes down. Our configuration backup tools take snapshots of your Microsoft 365 tenant configurations, keep backups of your previous states, and help you restore your configurations when disaster strikes.
